Return to Article: Independent estimate cuts cost of Census contract almost in half

By Gautham Nagesh gnagesh@govexec.com May 16, 2008
  • 50979

    If the government had said anyone filling out their Census forms would get $50 they wouldn't need all these warm bodies. They do the census today the same way as George Washington's time. You got to love government modernization and thinking out of the box. Oh yea no A76 for them they are already on top of their game

    Dan ketter Posted May 20, 2008 11:31 AM
  • 50919

    The headline is somewhat misleading. While the overall cost may have been reduced "in half", it's "mainly" due to them only delivering about 1/4 of the intial product. (Based on a line half way down the article, "MITRE's estimate is lower mainly because the number of handhelds was trimmed from 548,000 to 154,000, saving an estimated $148 million.")

    So did the "Independent estimate" cut the costs -- or did substantially reducing the order for hand-helds cut the costs?

    Patricia L Posted May 19, 2008 2:39 PM
  • 50889

    500,000 handheld computers? Does that mean we are hiring a half million people to do door to door canvasing? Where are the COTS (Commercial, off the shelf) solutions for this requirement? Why do we need to invent something to perform mundane tasks that can be linked via cell or other mechanism to databases sitting on servers? Come on!

    Herb Posted May 19, 2008 8:29 AM

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Independent estimate cuts cost of Census contract almost in half
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